All grown up
Café Boulud, Upper East Side
RESTAURANTS • First Person
Café Boulud, relocated and re-opened in December on East 63rd St. just off Park Ave., is a restaurant for grownups.
The dining room is a warm embrace: plush seating, soft lighting, a striking floral arrangement at center. There’s molding on the ceilings, Galerie Mourlot-curated art between mirror-paneled walls, and green velvet banquettes lining the room.
Compared to the high drama of Four Twenty Five and Cafe Carmellini, two other high-profile fine dining openings of the season, it’s a study in restraint, an exceptionally well-appointed, uptown Manhattan living room.
When you’re young, it’s fun to play the part at a place like Cafe Boulud — to get dressed up, and inhabit the fantasy of some other, more elevated New York City. To know that when the night ends, you’ll leave it all behind. But then you reach a certain age, and you look around and wonder if maybe you are, in fact, who this is for. And then what.
Well, you could just take it all in — the carefully choreographed maneuvers that make a room like this hum, that make a menu this diverse (four sections: la tradition, la saison, le potager, and le voyage) work. When it all comes together, it’s a symphony, as with the carrot tarte and the sea bass wrapped in potatoes, sauce meurette poured tableside.
Indeed, the meal rose to a crescendo by the time our appetizers arrived. Everything was moving in concert, the orchestrations of the staff and ambient noise lifting the room (while somehow not penetrating the conversations at our table). It was hard to imagine a more comfortable place on a winter Saturday night.
Somewhere between entrees and dessert, the energy flagged. Demanding parties of more-adult adults had sapped the attention of our server. Our delicate stemware sat empty.
Maybe this was too grown up, too restrained. Maybe it was best to keep searching for the next new, not to give in to the comfort of this paragon of civilized Upper East Side fine dining.
But then a molten chocolate cake and tarte tatin arrived and jolted us back to life. God they were good. Maybe we could get used to this, after all. –Josh Albertson
→ Café Boulud (Upper East Side), 100 E. 63rd St., Reserve.